John Currie Interview (8-5-20)

There is certainly a lot happening in college sports right now. Questions we don't know the answer to.

And a few that hopefully we can get answers out of our next guest. Wake Forest Director of Athletics John Curry is with us here. There's a lot going on.

Your time is appreciated, John. But I think I want to start with the scheduling because yesterday your department put out a lot of work. There was a release saying that the Notre Dame-Wake Forest game is still on for Bank of America Stadium on September the 26th. But as I look at your schedule, I still see there is a non-conference date available.

How small is the pool of schools right now that you're considering for that one non-conference date? You mentioned trying to get information. I'm trying to figure out what's going on from you. You're a lot more in tune with the sports world probably outfiring all the campus than I am.

So I'm looking forward to learning from you at this point. We're still working through the schedule. It's very complicated because the ACC with an odd number of teams this year and a finite number of dates is trying to balance the schedule throughout the year. So a big part of who we play at our non-conference is determined by when people can play. Because it's very likely that we will start with a conference game at the beginning of the season on September 12th rather than non-conference games. Because you can't put everybody's non-conference game on the same weekend. They've got to be distributed throughout the season.

So that makes it complex with other people's schedules. Ideally, would you still like to try and figure it out with Appalachian State? We definitely want to play Appalachian State.

I think a big challenge and I think Doug and I have had a number of conversations at the same time. Such a huge part of that robbery is fans in the stands. I was so excited about having that game on Friday night. I figured we'd set our all-time attendance record. We would probably set an all-time revenue record from a sales standpoint. So as we're tracking now, there's part of me that it seems a little bit empty to play such a historic rivalry in a game that means so much for our region in front of a very sparse crowd because of the regulations. If it works out this year, great. If it doesn't work out this year, we'll figure out a way to get Appalachian back to Winston-Salem.

Who knows? We might even figure out a way to extend that series. How many dates specifically are you considering? Has the ACC come to you and already said, here are dates available, you can schedule a non-conference opponent? And are any of those dates before September 12th? We can't play before September. The board directive is that week is the first week of the season.

We can't play. Although the NCAA has done waivers to enable schools to schedule. There are a couple articles about Oklahoma and Kansas and some other scheduled games on August 29th. That's not the reality of our league. We cannot start before that September 12th weekend.

Okay. But do you have a general idea for where the ACC is going to place your conference games, the nine of them, moving forward so that way you will know what dates you can schedule a non-conference date? The only game I know for sure at this point is the September 26th game against Notre Dame. The league's getting close, but it's still very fluid, so I'm not ready to state those dates right now. How many fans are you preparing for at this moment? Hopefully we'll get some good news from Roy Cooper late in the week with an announcement as right now, of course, we're in phase two. But at Truis Field and Bank of America Stadium, how many fans are you preparing for this moment? Well, we don't know, Josh, and part of this exercise over the last six months has been that a lot of times you just have to go with what is not a reassuring statement, which is I don't know.

But we have models based upon 25% and more, but we also know that, especially given the trajectory of infection rates and all that kind of stuff over the last month, that whereas I think at some point people thought, hey, we'll get 50% or 75%, I think that's unrealistic now. Our staff has been, you know, someday when the book about the pandemic is written, there'll be so many unsung heroes that have worked so hard, really without a break. I don't know anybody that's had a proper vacation this summer.

Even if they were at the beach, they were on Zoom calls all day. And so people like Ellie Shannon, who's our associate AD for event management and operations, you know, she has been, she and her staff, which is a relatively small staff, right? And Barry Fairclough and his staff, Brad Donald, the modeling they've done, and then trying to, I mean, it's not like you can go call the CDC and say, hey, send us the model for how we're going to put people in the stands because it's never been done before. So there's so much work that's had to have been done throughout the country, really from scratch. And we actually, Ellie's been around last night, you know, like a 10-page guide for visiting team operations in the COVID environment at Chewish Field and on road trips into Winston-Salem, right?

Well, that didn't exist a month ago, right? And so all this work behind the scenes, my big hope right now is that all this work ends up getting utilized. And so all this preparation and time that people across our campus have poured into students returning and enabling fans to come back to our games, enabling our students to come back. I'm very hopeful and optimistic that we will be able to play and put some of that work into practice. John Curry with us here, Wake Forest AD.

Help me out on this one, John. Why aren't you guys releasing positive testing info or coronavirus testing info altogether? Well, we are through Wake Forest University. We are complying with CDC and county guidelines on reporting. We do have an institutional policy as it relates to FERPA and HIPAA about medical privacy, and so we'll follow those guidelines. I think we have been transparent though, Josh, in talking about the overall parameters of our program. I've mentioned in my letters to the fans that, you know, we are doing regular testing. I've also mentioned that we've had very, very positive, I got to say positive in the right term, right? We've had very good results with how our students have responded and our student athletes have been responding to the parameters that we have. We do have a weekly testing program now that we've enacted that we think is very robust, and I've been very, very pleased with the way our student athletes have embraced that. And so far it works. Now we'll have to maintain vigilance and can't let your guard down and got to keep practicing safe behaviors, but so far we've really had a very relatively COVID-free environment.

Now I get that. I just see that, and usually when it comes to HIPAA, for those who don't know, there's a reason why coaches and administrators don't speak about specific players, injuries, or concerns during the season. But I guess what bothers me is when I see 12 of your colleagues in the ACC releasing how many positive tests and how many tests are conducted, it does feel transparent, and it does feel like something that everybody should be doing, and I don't think they're violating HIPAA or HIPAA, are they?

Well, every institution has to interpret it differently, according to the situation with their own institution. In our case, we have a university policy, and athletics falls under the university policy, and we'll adhere to the university policy. I want to close on this. John Curry, kind enough to spend some time with us here on SportsUp Triad. What have you learned about Commissioner Swafford's leadership during this process as he gets set to close his 23-year-plus tenure as ACC commissioner at about this time next year? Commissioner's been a great listener. He's also been strategic in inserting himself, in picking the right times. He has not been the commissioner or the AD or the president that's been out there and talked the most publicly over the six months of COVID, and I think that's been really good because I think there's been times where some have, you know, we need medical experts to be medical experts, we need athletic experts to be athletic experts, and I think our commissioner has done a really good job of staying focused on what we're trying to do, which is offer student athletes the ability to have a chance to compete in an atmosphere that's as safe as possible. Well, obviously there's a lot of questions we need to have answered that you don't, you could try your best to answer, but even yourself have to say, I don't know, as of this moment, and hopefully we get some more answers over the next few weeks, and hopefully we're playing football in about a month. I just appreciate you spending the time on this show and helping us learn a little bit more about what's going on in that building, and hopefully we could do it again sometime soon, John. Thanks for doing this. Always, Josh, enjoyed it, and I'll let everybody wear those masks and be safe.